Archive Page 14

A New Year’s Resolution

Published January 7, 2016 Characteristics of Believers , Purpose Leave a Comment
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I’ve been thinking about the one thing I would tell followers of Jesus Christ to start off the New Year, and my decision will shock you!

Did that introduction make you want to click on a link to see more? Well, the good news is that you don’t have to click on anything to read what I’ve written, and I won’t bombard you with ads in any event (you can tell I’m getting a bit sick of the Internet lately, can’t you?). So let’s get to the point. The one thing I’d like to tell followers of Jesus to start the New Year is this: remember the Judgment Seat of Christ!

“Oh no, he’s going to preach! And if it’s about some sort of judgment, then I’m hosed. I don’t want to be judged, and, frankly, I’m not really keen on anyone else being judged either!”

I suppose at least one person out there may be saying or thinking these very things right now. Give me just a minute, though, and I’ll explain why you should really look forward to this particular judgment and why you should try to remember it every day.

I’ve been thinking about the Judgment Seat of Christ (also known as the Bema Seat of Christ) because I’ve been trying to figure out why God has me working so hard on criminal justice reform when I’m not so sure that we’ll even see true reform before the rapture and tribulation. If it’s true that we’re really that close to the end (like I think we are), then why bother, right?

The answer came to me as I awoke the other day. And it starts with an understanding of the exciting judgment for followers of Jesus at the Judgment Seat of Christ.

We know that there’ll be judgment even for believers of Christ because in the Bible, Paul wrote:

We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.  (2 Corr. 5: 8-10)

On its face, this judgment can seem a bit intimidating, but if you read other parts of the Bible and various commentaries, it becomes clear that this judgment is only for determining a believer’s rewards in heaven. It doesn’t include judgment for sin, because sin is taken care of by Jesus’s death on the cross. I repeat – it doesn’t involve judgment for sin. Jesus is your proxy on that matter through your belief in him. Like Denise says, belief and faith in Jesus Christ is the golden ticket. Leave it to Denise to dream up a Willy Wonka reference.

So even though the passage above says that you’ll receive what is due to you for things done “good or bad,” it doesn’t mean morally bad. Instead, it means that certain things have eternal rewards in heaven (the good) and certain things don’t (the bad).

Think of it this way. You’re going to do a lot of things during your walk in the world, and you might consider some of those things to be really, really good things. For example, you might think that holding down a particular job your entire life is a pretty good thing. And to the world, it is. But it might not be the thing that gets additional rewards in heaven. That makes sense, right? The Bible talks about building a foundation on Jesus, and if you build your foundation on anything else, a fire will burn away all that is worthless, which will include things you may have thought were pretty good but that simply don’t measure up to reward-giving status.

Paul often likened our journey on earth as a race to be run, so imagine it that way for a minute. As a runner, you might do tons of good things to get ready for the race – lift weights, stretch, practice your starts – but in the end, you get a reward for winning the race. Those are the rules. It’s not that stretching was a bad thing – heck, it may have been crucial to winning – it’s just that you don’t get the reward for stretching. You get it runnerfor crossing the finish line first. Likewise, there are certain things that God finds deserving of rewards, such as winning souls, developing your spiritual gifts, showing love and sacrifice to others, etc., but there are also things that you might think would be deserving of a reward and aren’t. So when you think of the distribution of rewards for “good and bad” things done in the body, think of it simply as receiving rewards for eligible things that you actually did in the world. If those things weren’t eligible, or if you didn’t do them even if they were eligible, then you don’t get the additional rewards.

Remember when you were a child? I don’t know about you, but when I was a child and I did something I thought was a big deal, I went running to some adult to tell it to. Usually that was my mom or dad. And when I told them what I did, I found out that sometimes it wasn’t a big deal at all to my mom or dad. But sometimes it was. And when it was, I got a reward. And man, I wanted to get those rewards! Even when I was fifty years old, taking care of my dying dad in the world, I was constantly trying to impress him, looking for those rewards – like a smile or a laugh. Believe me, when I get to heaven I want that same feeling of “reward getting” from God as I got from my dad here on earth.

“Hey wait, does all of this mean that I’ll be compared to other people?” No, so you should think of the race as being your own personal race, like running against the clock. This is between you and Jesus. You won’t be envious or jealous of others getting rewards, and, in fact, whatever regret you may think you feel from not receiving a reward that you could have received will ultimately be wiped away from the overwhelming joy of being with God. As Denise often says, it’s like having tickets to the Super Bowl. Your seat may be right on the 50 yard line, or your seat may be up in the nosebleed section. Either way, though, you’re at the freakin’ Super Bowl!

Now when it comes to figuring out what God will deem pleasing or not so pleasing in your life, I’ll leave it up to you to do some further biblical research. But you should remember the following cautionary note that has people like me needing constant reminders about what God thinks matters: Throughout the Bible, people were told that because they received an earthly reward for something they did in the world, they’ll receive no reward for it in heaven. Holy smokes! This makes everything a bit more complicated, doesn’t it? Oh well. As I’ve said before, Christianity is simple, but it isn’t always easy.

So what does all of this have to do with my criminal justice job and whether that job even matters? It matters because every day God gives us opportunities to add to the tally of things that will bring us rewards when we stand before Christ. That’s how much He loves us. And that love and those opportunities will continue right up until the day of Jesus’s return. Every day God allows us all to decide whether or not to do something that is pleasing to Him and worth eternal reward. And my work, helping people to see why we need criminal law reform, is just one more opportunity that God is presenting his children – through me – to do something eternally worthwhile.

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You and I are basically in the same earthly business when it comes to other followers of Christ – the “opportunity for eternal reward business.” Every day you will likely give someone an opportunity to do a good thing, and I or someone else will likely give you the same opportunity. And because every opportunity will only help the body of Christ, it should be our intense desire to keep expanding our business. Every day, look for opportunities to do things pleasing to God. Every day, look for ways to give other people those same opportunities.

So this year, remember the Judgement Seat of Christ! Work each day on earning your rewards. And, please, work each day to help me earn mine!

Here Comes The Bride!

Published September 22, 2015 Gifts , music Leave a Comment
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With all the press about the Pope, you’d think I’d be writing about him. But I’m not. Instead, I’m going to just post a quick note to say that Denise and I are doing a wedding this weekend – Denise is officiating, and I’m playing the piano! It should be fun and exciting, except I’m never too happy to haul equipment across town. Like I always say, musicians don’t get paid to play – they get paid to schlep equipment. And I’m not even getting paid!

Anyway, this particular couple is young (21 or 22) and when they started meeting with us, they didn’t exactly know how they wanted the whole thing to go. But recently they told us that they want a wedding where God is front and center, and where He can be the third part of their relationship for the rest of their lives. Excellent!

Anyone who’s been married for long – heck, anyone who’s even been alive for long – knows that marriages can be tough, and personally, I don’t think you can do one without God. They don’t fully realize it yet, but having God in from the beginning is going to make everything in their lives a whole lot better and easier.

By the way, weddings have always been the hardest for me to play, and this one’s no different. The beautiful bride wants Wagner’s wedding march, and there’s a certain kind of stress that comes from knowing that a single mistake will cause everyone to stop looking at her and scowl at the piano player. You know, that’s why I write my own music – nobody ever knows when I’m screwing up!

Anyway, may God bless all of you!

Timothy Crane

God’s Purpose, Your Purpose, and Julian Bond

Published August 21, 2015 Purpose Leave a Comment
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Part of walking in the supernatural involves doing the “world thing,” which is really just the supernatural walk’s counterpart in the natural world. There are times that you don’t have to do anything in the world to watch and enjoy the supernatural realm working around you, but a lot of the time you have to do something. But if walking in the supernatural sometimes depends on what you do in the world, then what, exactly, should you do? In its broadest sense, this question raises the important topic of your purpose in this world.

When I was younger, I asked my dad, “What’s the meaning of life – what’s the purpose of everything?” Sadly, he answered only in terms of the natural world. He said the purpose is to get a good job, have a family, use that job to provide for that family, work hard, etc. Later on, when we talked more and more life and God, I’m pretty sure he changed his mind a bit and would have answered the same question quite differently.

In my opinion, we’re here to learn God’s purpose as provided to us in the Bible, and then to discern our own purposes for this world that God has selected for us. You can get into the weeds pretty fast by trying to pin down God’s purposes (and you can read all of the detail about both God’s and our purposes in Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life), but most every follower of Christ thinks that God created men and women to love them and for them to love Him – to have a relationship, or, as some would say now, a reconciled and restored relationship. It’s a lot like an earthly father or mother. Why would they have a child? Mostly, it’s because they want someone whom they can love and who will love them back. But God’s purpose goes further. Whereas an earthly mom or dad might want good things for their child and have some general ideas about what they want them to do, God has a very specific and beneficial purpose for your life and you were born to achieve that purpose and to follow His will. Figuring out that purpose becomes the key to doing things in the natural that run smoothly parallel to the supernatural.

Discerning God’s purpose for you can take a moment or a lifetime; it can be placed in you as a “desire of your heart,” or it can be thrust upon you and constantly established as a supernatural desire of God that you can’t deny. It can line up with what you thought you wanted to do in your life (such as, to make a bunch of money) or it can be what you never thought you’d ever do in your life (such as, to live meagerly and help the less fortunate). The key is to figure out that purpose, make sure it lines up with God’s will, and then do it.

As Denise wrote in her book, you can make sure that things line up with God’s will generally by simply following a couple of broad boundaries. For example, when asked about commandments, Jesus summed up everything found in the OT law and prophets into two: love God, and love others as yourself. This one boundary, alone, can help you decide whether the thing you’re doing in the world is something that might be a part of your supernatural purpose. First and foremost, does it show love for God by glorifying Him? Does it please God?  Hint – if it’s not biblical, it probably doesn’t.

This command will automatically put pressure on you to do God’s will for you in the world. Whatever you’re doing – and even if follows biblical principles – if you don’t feel God’s pleasure (and believe me, God will let you know his pleasure or displeasure through the supernatural, even if you might be ignoring it), then you need to re-assess. When I practiced law in Washington D.C, I had a few friends who said, “I’m not sure that what I’m doing is helping anyone.” These kinds of thoughts likely represented God talking to my friends, and ran counter to any thoughts they might have entertained that God’s purpose for their lives was making sure that extremely wealthy people had good federal representation. On the other hand, I knew other people in the same firm who constantly felt that they were helping people and were using the law practice even to witness for Christ. They felt the pleasure of God in the work they did, and were likely coming quite close to fulfilling God’s purpose for their particular lives. There wasn’t anything necessarily unbiblical about the work in the law firm, but some of the people simply didn’t belong there. It wasn’t their purpose.

Pleasing God is good, but even those of us with the best intentions us can do awful, horrible things and justify that we are somehow pleasing God. That’s why I think Jesus also emphasized the second part of the command/boundary – love others as you would love yourself. It’s hard to do, but if you constantly do it, I think it’ll change your life. It’s this command that causes people to switch careers, to start missions, and to find blessings in a life that the world might scorn for its lack of material gain. It’s also the command that changes the way you walk down the street, that tells you not to write nasty comments on the Internet, and that keeps you from honking and swearing at people for how they drive.

This second part is also important because, despite talking about loving yourself, the command is not about self-love. This is incredibly relevant today, an era defined by Facebook pages, selfies, Twitter followers, and sharing information more to show one’s own interests than to disseminate knowledge. Quite simply, it’s awfully hard to do God’s will when all you’re thinking about is yourself.

Overall, you’re lining up what you think you should do with whether it follows biblical principles, whether it leads to inner thoughts of contentment showing God’s pleasure, and whether it shows love for others. That may seem to limit your options, but knowing that you are following your supernatural purpose will make it all worthwhile. Think of it this way – the world has plenty of things for people to do who don’t believe or care about God. But you, a follower of Jesus, should be looking for all of those other things that do.

I say all this because just a few days ago, amid all the trending stories of movie stars, musicians, athletes, and others trying to capture clicks, views, and likes, I saw that Julian Bond had died. For all I know, those other people might be following God’s will for their lives and doing all they can to love others as themselves, but it seems to me that Julian Bond, in particular, took a walk in the world that likely pleased God. Some of Julian’s purpose was likely thrust upon him. Who, in their right mind, would want to have the kind of hatred and scorn heaped upon them that was likely heaped upon the person that helped lead the civil rights movement, founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, and ran the NAACP? There’s a lot of natural world selfishness these days, too, but I think Julian Bond mostly stayed away from it and lived a life focused mostly on others.

By the way, even though my dad had told me that the purpose of life was to have a good job, provide for family, and other things in the natural world, he never mentioned any of those things at his death. As he was dying, I was with him constantly, and he only wanted to talk about God and people – what God and people meant to him, what God and people did for him and what he did for them. My dad was focused on a boundary that helps us to walk with purpose in the world, and he wanted to know whether he had lived a life that had pleased God.

I imagine that the same thing happened to Julian Bond at the end of his life, and I can only assume that the same will happen to you and me.

The Pattern of the World

Published July 27, 2015 Characteristics of Believers , Hearing God , Supernatural Leave a Comment
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I’m way off track on my goal of switching from full-time criminal justice reform to creating a new album and studying more about God. It’s super frustrating, but I can see some light. Plus, I consider everything I do with criminal justice reform still to be doing God’s will – in fact, I call what I do “God’s Project,” because of all the things He’s done to make it happen. So if He wants me to keep it up, I will. Part of walking in the supernatural is to hear God and do what He says no matter what else you think you want to do. We’ll see.

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Last week I watched with amusement the Family Leadership Summit, where each of most of the Republican candidates for president answered questions about pretty much everything, including God. I watched a lot of strange answers, including a guy who said that he never asks for forgiveness (apparently he doesn’t need it), but that he enjoys eating that “little cracker.” Most of the answers made me think that everyone was just trying to find that perfect balance between talking about God and not saying anything too crazy to lose votes. Political Christianity.

A lot of America is probably content with these kinds of answers. But if you’re a follower of Jesus, you have to get used to living in a foreign land – the natural world, where everything Jesus said and did often seems crazy to most everyone else. For a moment, I wondered what it would look like if a candidate for president was truly someone who believed in all that Jesus taught and modeled. Someone who believed in the supernatural. Someone who understood the transcendent force of love for all persons, even those who are unloved by the world. What would he say? Would he be called a “Republican?” Would he even be there?

In my opinion, if Jesus himself were in Ames Iowa that day, he wouldn’t have been labeled as either a Republican or a Democrat. If he spoke to anybody, he probably would have spoken of things that people simply wouldn’t have understood. Just like before, he would have spoken of wonderful things to give hope to all humanity, but he also likely would have spoken about things that would have made people want to kill him. The more I think about it, the more I believe that he wouldn’t have even gone in to the Summit – I think he would have spent his time looking for the poor and displaced people that were somewhere in the backstreets of Ames.

If you’re like me, and you want to follow this radical named Jesus, you have to realize that some things he said might be labeled ultra-conservative, while other things might be considered downright socialist. And so to truly follow Jesus, you’re going to have to get used to feeling like a complete outcast in the natural world. That’s to be expected. In Romans 12, Paul wrote, “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.”  Jesus mentions being “not of this world” a few times, and one commentary explains one of those statements quite succinctly: “The Spirit of God in true Christians is opposed to the spirit of the world.”

If the whole political thing just frustrates and confuses you – especially when they talk about God – then that’s a good thing. In my opinion, that’s just you listening to the Spirit of God and not conforming to the pattern of the world.

Be blessed, everyone!

Spiritual Warfare in South Carolina

Published June 22, 2015 Supernatural Leave a Comment
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When we all learned about someone killing nine followers of Jesus Christ in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina, some said it was the most unbelievable and unimaginable thing possible. Inside a church? After a bible study?  People tried to label it – a hate crime, a terrorist act, perhaps something unable even to be labeled. But today the headline on CNN spoke the truth, as it quoted the Reverend Norvel Goff as saying that, “No evildoer, no demon in hell or on earth can close the doors of God’s church.” Indeed, this attack was brought on by evil. It was a part of the spiritual war.

This ministry is not geared toward people who aren’t followers of Jesus Christ. It’s called “Arming the Saints” because it’s main goal is to help followers of Jesus recognize the supernatural, and to react accordingly. And if you’re a follower of Jesus Christ, then you believe in the Bible and what the Bible teaches. And if you believe in what the Bible teaches, you should see the truth of recognizing something demonic at work inside the church in South Carolina.

The Bible is clear that we’re in a spiritual war: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Eph. 6:12). Knowing this, if someone would have asked me where some of the heaviest fighting would be, I would have said, quite confidently, inside our churches and against God’s people. There’s nothing unimaginable about a demon wanting to come into a church to harm followers of Christ. It’s exactly what I would expect.

Now, I’ve been in a lot of church buildings, and I’ve been in more than I’d like to mention with some demonic presence. I know it sounds bad, but it happens (virtually always unintentionally), and so I’ve done my share of rebuking demons even inside what we like to think are some of our most hallowed buildings. But I’ve also been in church buildings with such an incredibly strong covering of prayer and rebuking that no demonic presence can even get close. And, please, don’t get me wrong. I am by no means saying that any of the people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church did anything wrong. They are Saints, losing them is a horrible loss, and I only hope that when I go, I go like them – praising Jesus Christ while facing down evil with the knowledge of God’s grace and an awaiting eternity.

But a spiritual issue requires a spiritual response. So when you hear the natural world talk about how to keep this “unimaginable” thing from happening in the future, remember that Ephesians 6 gives us the true answer: “Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”

May God bless and show His infinite grace to all persons.

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